THE RICHARD J MURPHY YOUTUBE CHANNEL
DEBATE AMMUNITION
ACCOUNTING'S TIME MACHINE: HOW MODERN FINANCE STEALS THE FUTURE
Funding the Future | June 2026
TODAY'S TOPIC
Accounting's Time Machine: How Modern Finance Steals the Future
The video this Debate Ammunition relates to is here.
THE CORE ARGUMENT
Modern accounting does not record what has happened: it reaches into the future, discounts expected income back to a present value, and books the resulting number as profit today, before any cash has been received and on the basis of assumptions that may prove wholly wrong. This practice, introduced across all major company accounts in 2005 under International Financial Reporting Standards, is not a technical refinement: it is a political act. By inflating stated wealth today with tomorrow's uncertain gains, it creates the basis for directors' bonuses and shareholder dividends that are paid out of money that does not yet exist and may never materialise. The future is systematically appropriated by those who own financial assets, and the rest of society is left to carry the risk and, ultimately, the cost.
THE ARGUMENT STRUCTURE
| Step | Argument |
|---|---|
| Step 1 — The Confessional: What Accounting Used to Do | Until the neoliberal reform of 2005, accounting was governed by the principle of prudence: losses were anticipated immediately, but profits could only be recognised once they had actually been realised by a completed transaction. The future was kept out of the accounts. |
| Step 2 — The Time Machine: How Discounting Works | Using a worked numerical example, Richard shows how discounted cash flow analysis translates expected future income into a present value. A £10,000 investment expected to generate £26,000 in future cash becomes £20,000 in today's accounting terms, using an assumed 10% discount rate. The gain of £10,000 is then booked as profit now, before a single penny has been received. |
| Step 3 — The Fiction Dressed as Fact | The profit recorded is built entirely on assumptions: an assumed discount rate, estimated future cash flows, and a guessed sale price. None of these is guaranteed. Yet certified auditors sign off the accounts as giving a true and fair view, providing spurious mathematical precision to what is, in Richard's words, pure gobbledygook. |
| Step 4 — The Political Consequence: Stealing the Future | This accounting convention reaches far beyond corporate balance sheets. It shapes how pension funds and stock markets are valued, how directors' bonuses and dividends are calculated, and, critically, how society discounts the costs of climate change into near-irrelevance. The future is appropriated by the wealthy today, and the rest of society is left to pay the price tomorrow. |
THEIR ARGUMENT → YOUR REBUTTAL
| They Say | Your Response |
|---|---|
| Discounting simply reflects the time value of money: a pound today really is worth more than a pound next year. This is a basic economic reality, not a political choice. | The time value of money is real enough when interest rates are known and cash flows are certain. But the discount rate used in mark-to-market accounting is chosen by management, not given by nature. A 10% rate and a 5% rate produce entirely different valuations of the same asset. That choice belongs to the company, not the market, and it is taken precisely because it inflates today's stated profit. |
| Fair value accounting makes company accounts more transparent and more informative for investors. It provides a current, realistic picture rather than a historical cost frozen in time. | Transparency requires truth. A number derived from assumed cash flows, an arbitrary discount rate, and a guessed sale price is not a current reality: it is a forecast dressed in accountant's clothing. When those assumptions prove wrong, as they routinely do, the 'transparency' collapses. Ask any investor who held shares in a bank in 2008 whether IFRS accounting gave them a reliable picture. |
| Auditors sign off these accounts, which means they are independently verified. If the numbers were fabricated, auditors would not certify them. | Auditors certify that the accounting standards have been applied, not that the underlying assumptions are correct. They cannot verify what the discount rate should be, or what a sale price in three years will actually turn out to be. They are certifying the arithmetic, not the predictions. The 2008 financial crisis demonstrated in catastrophic detail the distance between certified accounts and commercial reality. |
| Discounting future climate costs is appropriate because economic growth means future generations will be wealthier and therefore better placed to deal with those costs than we are. | This is precisely the circular logic Richard identifies. The discount rate is used to shrink the present value of future climate damage until it becomes negligible, which then justifies minimal action now. But future generations cannot exercise their supposedly greater wealth if the ecological systems that sustain an economy have been destroyed. The discount rate does not reflect economic reality: it encodes a political choice to privilege the present over the future. |
THE ONE-LINER
“Accountants have built a time machine that lets the wealthy claim tomorrow's profits as today's bonuses, and the rest of us are left to pay for it.”
FURTHER READING
All sources below are from taxresearch.org.uk (Funding the Future blog) and are directly relevant to the arguments in this video.
| Title | Date | Relevance |
|---|---|---|
| What is profit? | January 2009 | Directly addresses how the shift from historical-cost to mark-to-market accounting changed the definition of profit and enabled manufactured dividends. |
| Are International Financial Reporting Standards illegal? | June 2013 | Argues that IFRS abandoned the legal requirement of prudence and that up to £50 billion in pre-crash bank dividends may therefore have been unlawful. |
| International accounting standards do not meet the requirements of UK law | September 2015 | Examines the legal gap between IFRS-reported profits and the realised profits on which tax and dividend law depend, arguing for parliamentary oversight of standard-setting. |
| The time to scrap IFRS accounting has arrived | April 2020 | Calls for return to historical cost accounting, noting that IFRS rules allowed banks to suppress loss reporting during the 2020 crisis, repeating the failures of 2008. |
| Stock markets are now inherently unstable because current accounting standards have ceased to value the real worth of companies | April 2020 | Connects mark-to-market valuation conventions directly to structural stock market instability, with particular attention to the role of present-value discounting. |
| If we discount the future we won't tackle climate change | October 2021 | Develops the precise argument made in this video: that discounting renders future climate costs nearly worthless in present-value terms, discouraging necessary immediate action. |
| The inequality lie | October 2025 | Demonstrates how official inequality data understate the scale of the problem; complements the video's argument that accounting conventions actively redistribute power to the wealthy. |
| The problem with the UK is that we do not redistribute income, let alone wealth | April 2025 | Shows that the UK tax system fails to redistribute income or wealth, providing political economy context for the video's claim that accounting inflates inequality. |
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[…] The Debate Ammunition for this video is available here. […]
Accountants are the work of the devil………………….. Ducking stools, burn the books, time for the Spanish inquisition, we must root out the evil of accountancy!!!!!!
Who decides the International Accounting Standards?
Do they automatically apply to all countries?
If so what about taking back control?
The International Financial Reporting Standard
Totally lacking in accountability – except to the Big 4 accoumtants and some multinational corporations. It igores the European Union